To the Wedding

12

In Torino near the Ponte Vittorio Emanuele, a dog is standing beside a fisherman on the quayside. Jean Ferrero is looking at them from the road above. His bike is by the curb. He has put his gauntlets and helmet on the stone parapet over which he’s leaning. There is no sun, but the atmosphere is close and the colour of the stone of the parapet — the colour of quince jelly after the jar has been opened for a long while — absorbs the heat.

Careful, says a woman’s voice, you don’t want it to fall in — and she touches the helmet — or do you?

She speaks an Italian which is so melodious and so grave that her spoken words, however ordinary their sense, sound as if they came from the Bible.

“Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

The hand on the crash helmet matches the voice. Such delicate hands often go with silken hair, an epidermic sensitivity which amounts to a wound, and a will of iron.

You’d never get it out of the river, she says, it’s too dirty, too foul.

She proceeds to rock the helmet on the parapet with her angel’s hand.

It’s we who have ruined it, her voice continues, we ruin everything.

Her clothes are dusty and old — like those thrown aside when women are looking through a pile of oddments in a market. She wears lipstick — a discreet one, but clumsily applied, as though she couldn’t see any more what her fine fingers were doing.

There’s very little you can do, she says, and what you can do never seems enough. One must go on though.

I shall have a house one day, but not in this murderous valley. I want a house from which I can see the sea from every window. Ninon’s house. It must exist somewhere. Not blue sea, a silver sea. In my house I shall have a kitchen with a table like Tante Claire’s for cutting the vegetables on by the window. And in the kitchen I shall have a buffet made of pearwood like ours downstairs. But what’s in it will be different. It won’t be full of old bills and photos and a battery for the bike and plates that are never used because they are too pretty. In the buffet I shall have plates that are pretty and which I’ll use. And on the shelf above my plates I shall have a line of heavy glass jars, each one with a thick cork top — perhaps the fishermen will give me a few of the corks they use to keep their nets afloat and which I see them hauling into their boats each morning from my bedroom window. And in my glass jars I shall keep sugar and bread crumbs and coffee and two kinds of flour and dried broad beans and cornflakes and cocoa and honey and salt and Parmesan and myrtilles in gnole for Papa when he comes to visit.

Life depends on it, the old woman by the parapet continues, none of us can stop. You pick up something here, you take something there, you wake up with an idea, you suddenly remember it’s a long time since you tried that, and you go home and put what you go home with into the refrigerator. Every day you keep going. Have you noticed the man down there with the dog?

Yes.

You’ve noticed the man with a dog? He’s my husband. My second husband. He worked for Fiat. Marrying me didn’t do him any good. I fouled it up for him.

Jean Ferrero turns his back, unzips his leather jacket and places it on the parapet. The summer heat has begun. It will fluctuate, go cooler, get much hotter, erupt in storms preceded by violent winds, be somnolent for days under a milky haze, but the heat on the southern side of the Alps will now remain for three months. And this reduces anxiety for the future. There may be despair, particularly the despair of boredom, or the sudden mortal rage of fatigue. But the threat of the future as something different recedes. Every day leads to the next which is more or less the same.

You’re better off without your jacket. The woman touches its leather lying on the parapet. Fine quality!

Jean Ferrero’s shirt is sweat-stained.

I try to keep it full of what he likes, the refrigerator, or of what he used to like, she says. Every day I take something out for him. Sometimes I try to surprise him, it’s a way of getting a smile out of him. Every day I put something back in. It’s like packing for a journey. It’s an art to pack it, for it’s a very small refrigerator, it came from a caravan. The caravan was scrapped. How to keep it full for him, that’s my job.

Three young men in jeans are admiring the bike by the curb.

Bellissima!

Three hundred kilometres an hour!

The clocks exaggerate but she’s lovely.

How much do you think she weighs?

She’s heavy.

Heavy and fast.

Look at her twin headlights.

Abbagliante!

My husband opens the door of the frigo, says the woman, but it’s only to find something to give to the dog. He’s lost his appetite, my husband. For the dog I go to the restaurants. But I’ve never — it’s a question of pride — never offered my man anything they gave me at the backdoor of a restaurant. Only what I’ve prepared with my own hands is good enough for him. It’s a lifelong task. One day he won’t be able to eat any more, not even the tortellini he once liked so such, and they’ll bury him in the cemetery over there, and the refrigerator will be thrown on to a dump.

The barber in Asklipiou Street had the finger of his left hand on top of my skull to keep the head still, and he was shaving with his razor the back of my neck. I lost the old woman’s voice and another came to me.

Five hundred years ago, this voice says, three wise men were arguing, before Nushiran the Just, about the heaviest wave in this deep sea of sorrow which is life. Now I recognise the voice. It belongs to Jari from Alexandria who loves to interrupt. One wise man said it was illness and pain, Jari continues. Another said it was old age and poverty. The third wise man insisted it was approaching death with lack of work. In the end the three of them agreed that the last was probably the worst. Approaching death and lack of work.

He almost never catches anything, says the old woman by the parapet to Jean — almost never. I’ve seen it happen only twice. Do you know what his weakness is? I will tell you. Quaquare di limone! He loves Quaquare.

Jean Ferrero stares into the opaque water of the river which never stops flowing.

The old woman with her angel hand opens her purse and announces: I haven’t enough. I have six thousand which is half what a packet costs! He eats them with his black coffee, after his siesta. Might a box of Quaquare di limone be something we could offer him together, Signore, the two of us?

The signalman searches in the pocket of his leather jacket for some money.

I have learnt to write my name: Ninon. I’m sitting at the kitchen table and I’m writing. The letter N goes like a dog’s tongue, the letter I sprouts like a seed, the letter N goes like I said, O is a bow and N is N. Now I can write my name: NINON.

Jean Ferrero is seated at a café table under the ochre arcades in the Via Po. In front of him is a cappuccino and a glass of ice-cold water. Nothing else in the city sparkles like these glasses of water. He leans back in his chair; he has crossed the mountains. Probably his grandfather once came to Torino to argue a case with a notary. Today the arcades are the colour of old files whose labels have been changed many times. Hearing a laugh, he raises his head. It takes him some time to find the one laughing. It’s a woman’s laugh. Not in the arcade, not at the bar, not by the newspaper kiosk. The laughter sounds as if it comes from a field in the country. Then he spots her. She is standing at a second-storey window on the other side of the street, shaking a tablecloth or a bedcover. A tram passes but he still hears her laughter, and she is still laughing when the tram has gone, a woman no longer young, with heavy arms and short hair. It is impossible to know what she’s laughing at. When she stops laughing, she’ll have to sit down to catch her breath.

Gino’s in love with me. I’m bending down. When I straighten up, my knees will crease and the crease will smile. My middle is a riddle. It starts at the ribs and ends like my dress just above the crease. How beautiful I’m becoming for him.